Canadian actor Taylor Kitsch.
Taylor Kitsch, the Kelowna, B.C.-born hunk who's been the cover boy for Men's Health magazine (twice) and most recently hit the big screen as the muscle-bound Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is literally - and quite deliberately - wasting away.
Clothes hang on his once-ripped, six-foot frame. His normally tanned skin is wan and grey. He hasn't been able to sleep for weeks, and is fighting chronic exhaustion. "I probably weigh about 150 pounds right now, and I feel like shit," says the 28-year-old. "I wrote an e-mail to my best friend the other day saying I feel like a 14-year-old pregnant girl, trapped in an alley, with nowhere to go."
Okay, all weird. The guy who makes women drool as heart-breaking running back Tim Riggins on NBC's Friday Night Lights (which airs on Global in Canada) is likening himself to an impregnated teen? Are his marbles intact?
As it turns out, a surreal head space is exactly where Kitsch wants to be.
The dramatic weight loss - he dropped 30 pounds in two months - is all part of his commitment to embracing his latest film role as Pulitzer Prize-winning, drug-addled photojournalist Kevin Carter in the upcoming Canadian/South African co-production, The Bang Bang Club - whose title mirrors the self-styled moniker of a tight-knit group of four young men whose photographs captured the final bloody years of apartheid, from the time Nelson Mandela left his jail cell in February, 1990, to the 1994 elections.
"My mom doesn't like even hearing what I'm going through playing him," says Kitsch, who has wrapped another dawn-to-dusk day on the set in Johannesburg, where the cast and crew have just re-enacted a public execution by necklacing - placing a gasoline-filled rubber tire around a person's neck, and setting it on fire. "This role," adds the actor, "was a dream of mine, yet probably the biggest challenge of my career, but I'm [expletive]spent."
Kitsch grew up a typical Canadian rink rat, playing junior hockey with the Langley Hornets before a knee injury sidelined him for good. His mother encouraged him to do some modelling (he hated it) before he switched to acting classes in New York, eventually nabbing parts in such forgettable films as John Tucker Must Die and Snakes on a Plane . His big break came when he was chosen to play the brooding running back in the critically lauded Friday Night Lights .
Kitsch caught wind of The Bang Bang Club - and the role of Carter, whose 1993 Pulitzer-winning photo, of a vulture stalking a starving child, came to define the famine in Sudan - in the final days of shooting Wolverine with Hugh Jackman in Vancouver. He recalls reading the script on the plane back to Los Angeles. He met Bang Bang 's director, Steven Silver, the next day.
"I told Steven in that meeting, 'Listen, I know you know nothing about me. But if I get this role, you're going to get everything I've got,'" recalls Kitsch, whose character sports a diamond stud earring and African tribal bracelets.
"In this movie, there's no such thing as taking a scene off. Each day is so [expletive]intense. But no one is going to put more pressure on me than myself to put the life back into Kev," he says of the photographer, who committed suicide in 1994. "I want to leave people with way more than an impression of a haggard drug addict. People tend to remember the worst. But I want to bring the life, the laughter, his sense of humour back. When Kev was happy, his smile was ear-to-ear. I'm all over the map with this guy because if you read up on who Kev Carter was, anything goes, really."
The rest of the Bang Bang Club included photographers Greg Marinovich (played by Ryan Phillippe), Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach) and Joao Silva (Neels Van Jaarlsveld). On the film set everyday have been Marinovich (who won his own Pulitzer) and Silva; the two men co-wrote the 2000 book on which the film is based. Sadly, the real-life Bang Bang Club came to an end in April, 1994, with the death of Oosterbroek. Carter's best friend, he was killed while photographing a firefight in Thokoza days before the national elections that the Bang Bang Club had worked so hard to support.
On July 27 of that year, Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit River and taped one end of a hose to his pickup truck's exhaust pipe, running the other end to the passenger window. He died of carbon-monoxide poisoning at 33. His suicide note ended with the line: "I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."
Like a young De Niro
It's just past 6:30 p.m. and, despite his exhaustion, Kitsch seems happy to chat on his cellphone into the evening. An easy conversationalist, he exudes a down-to-earth chumminess that gives away his West Coast roots. "I called home the other day and my mom said my little sister Haley just about kicked down the door, running in, shouting that Gambit is on a Slurpee cup! She was so proud of me!" laughs Kitsch, who has two younger sisters, as well as two thirtysomething brothers.
Dubbed Hollywood's newest "It" boy since the release of Wolverine , Kitsch seems to have no attitude, no airs. But he's not thick, and he knows he's been blessed with an insanely handsome face. That's precisely why he's taking baby steps to choose roles that will get people to see beyond the drop-dead good looks, and appreciate his talent. The Bang Bang Club fit his requirements to a T.
The movie is Silver's feature-film directorial debut. Having spent the past 20 years making documentaries, primarily in Canada, the 42-year-old says it was Kitsch's performance as the damaged Riggins in Friday Night Lights that convinced him the actor could nail the role of Carter: He had the perfect mix of scruff, machismo and vulnerability the director was seeking.
"Kevin was quite skinless," explains Silver, who grew up in South Africa but moved to Canada in 1995 at the age of 27. "By that, I mean he was so open to everything - so engaged in the moment.
"It was that quality that made him a fantastic photographer, but it also meant that everything he saw - all the bloodshed and the violence - seeped in, and he couldn't handle it all," adds the director, who has been trying to get the film made for eight years, and has written 18 drafts of the script.
"Taylor takes my words and turns them into something that is always new and exciting. I didn't cast look-alikes, but inadvertently they've almost taken the shape of the people they're playing," he says, adding that even when the cameras stop, the guys stay in character, calling themselves by their scripted names.
"We like to say around here that Ryan is the anchor of the film - the Harvey Keitel of the piece - while Taylor is like a young Robert De Niro in Mean Streets . He's the snap, crackle and pop."
As gruelling as some of the scenes have been for the actors, Canadian producer Daniel Iron of Toronto's Foundry Films says no one has injected more blood, sweat and tears into this project than Silver, who was active in the National Union of South African Students (an affiliate of the African National Congress's internal legal group) before moving to Canada.
"This is Steven's film. He lived through this, knew many of the people in this story. He was a young law student very involved in the burgeoning democracy. This is a story I think he has had to make," says Iron, who has also been in South Africa since March, shooting in Johannesburg, Soweto and Thokoza - places where the photojournalists chronicled the final atrocities of white rule.
Iron, who is co-producing with Lance Samuels and Adam Friedlander of Out of Africa Inc., hopes to complete the film in time for the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "But it's a film I'm not going to rush," he says. "I'm going to take my time and do it right."
A tumultuous time
Silver says he became captivated by the Bang Bang Club after reading a Time magazine article about Carter almost a decade ago. It became something of a quest for him to understand the photographers' motivation to put themselves in grave danger every day.
"These guys' photographs jar you to this day. They gave us images that otherwise would have remained hidden from us, and I was fascinated by the kind of people who did that," says Silver, who also wrote and co-produced Gerrie & Louise , a Gemini-winning and International Emmy Award-winning documentary for the CBC.
"They were young men and this work gave them a career - a rock 'n' roll ride they found exciting. [They were]ordinary men who threw themselves into extraordinary places at a tumultuous time. It's about how these men were negotiating the rules of the world as they manoeuvred into manhood."
Kitsch says he believes Oosterbroek's death - combined with some harsh criticism thrown Carter's way for photographing, and not helping, that Sudanese toddler - is what finally tipped Carter over the edge. "This guy was hardwired to self-destruct," he says.
After arriving back home in Austin, Tex., this week, Kitsch has been hitting the gym, trying to bulk up again for his football-stud role in the new season of Friday Night Lights .
It will be a long time, he adds, before he begins to really shake Kevin Carter out of his head. "This film isn't just about death - that would be incredibly depressing," he says. "It's a vindication of what these guys did. They brought this to the surface and made the world sit up and take notice.
"In a sense, The Bang Bang Club is a celebration. What they did took incredible courage. They stepped into situations most others would not, which I guess means they were a little bit crazy. But they really did seek change. They didn't want to be bystanders any more."